Mark Zuckerberg already knows what he wants his legacy to look like.
Zuckerberg sat down for an interview with content creator Tiffany Janzen that aired on Sunday. She asked him about the legacy he wanted to leave behind a hundred years from now.
Zuckerberg responded that his work lies in building the “fundamental platforms around how people connect” — and that work continues to evolve.
“I would guess that if you look back, you know, 20, 30 years from now, we’re still going to be a technology company. Right, we’re not like — we’re not an app company,” Zuckerberg said of Meta.
“So we’re focused on primarily building the underlying technology platform and I think that that’s going to be true, for probably — and like, certainly as long as I’m doing this,” he added.
Zuckerberg said as well that he just wants Meta to be a company that “builds awesome things.”
“And I would like people to look back on us and say, ‘Oh, they took a bunch of really big swings. And maybe not everything that they did worked. But a bunch of the stuff that they did really kind of pushed the industry and pushed the world in different directions and that was cool,’” the Meta chief said.
Representatives for Zuckerberg at Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
The 40-year-old billionaire has come a long way since starting Facebook in his Harvard dorm room back in 2004.
Zuckerberg’s company continued to grow over the years when it acquired competitors like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.
Then, in 2021, Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta, signaling his intent to rebrand it as “metaverse first, not Facebook first.”
Under Zuckerberg, Meta has continued to make inroads in the hardware side as well.
Besides stockpiling Nvidia’s highly coveted AI chips, Zuckerberg has sought to dominate in the field of wearable tech with the company’s Quest mixed-reality headsets. On Wednesday, he unveiled the company’s Orion AR glasses, which impressed analysts with its lightweight design.
That said, notching a win in the wearables industry won’t be easy.
Apple has struggled to sell its Vision Pro headsets despite the product’s splashy release earlier this year. The tech giant isn’t expected to sell more than 500,000 headsets this year, per predictions from market intelligence firm IDC.
But that hasn’t halted Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Meta, which he has repeatedly emphasized as having the DNA of a technology company.
“I think it’s that we’re a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. We never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that,” Zuckerberg said in an interview on the “Acquired” podcast that aired on September 18.
“For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are, is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today.”
To be sure, Zuckerberg and his peers are all about legacy-building.
Silicon Valley has long had its fair share of leaders like Zuckerberg, who have been outspoken about their desire to not be defined by a singular product.
For instance, the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone maker to be more than just a typical consumer electronics company.
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing,” Jobs said in March 2011 while launching the iPad 2.
Zuckerberg’s rival Elon Musk has similar ambitions for his legacy as well, albeit on a multi-planetary scale.
Musk runs a constellation of six companies, ranging from the EV giant Tesla to rocket company SpaceX. Though disparate, Musk sees all his companies as being critical to achieving his goal of colonizing Mars.
“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” Musk said during a court testimony in 2022 about his hefty Tesla compensation package.
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